"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." - Plato

Friday, August 03, 2012

White House Economist Makes Sour Lemons From Bad Lemonade

This just in from Barack Hussein Obama. The unemployment rate only rose from 8.217% to 8.254%.

Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
shows that private sector establishments added 172,000 jobs last month,
and overall non-farm payroll employment rose by 163,000. The economy has
now added private sector jobs for 29 straight months, for a total of
4.5 million jobs during that period.

The household survey showed that the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3% in July (or, more precisely, the rate rose from 8.217% in June to 8.254% in July).
Acting BLS Commissioner John Galvin noted in his statement that the
unemployment rate was “essentially unchanged” from June to July.

Consider this: the number was based on a non seasonally adjusted July number of 132,868. This was a 1.248 million drop from the June print. So how did the smoothing work out to make a real plunge into an "adjusted" rise? Simple: the BLS "added" 377K jobs for seasonal purposes.
This was the largest seasonal addition in the past decade for a July
NFP print in the past decade, possibly ever, as the first chart below
shows.

About Me

I was born in Tombstone, Arizona, but moved to California in 1959 when labor strikes at the copper mines devastated the Arizona economy. I've been moving north ever since. Pullman is as far north as I care to live and I'm looking toward reversing the drift.